Industrial Placement Review

GSK is a great company to work for and especially within my team I felt that I had a lot of support.

Everyone I worked with was really nice and helped me to learn a lot about my subject area. They were always really keen to answer my questions and give me any information I need to know in order to do a piece of work

I had a switch over of supervisor half-way through the year and the previous and next supervisor worked together to ensure that the switch over was easy for me and to make sure that they aligned their management styles such as how our one-to-one meetings are run.

I felt like I could have had a lot more work to do. I spent a lot of time learning without having a piece of work and essentially working on personal development.

After a few months I was given opportunities to take the lead in my own work such as corresponding with the client by myself on a piece of work and coming up with solutions myself. At the same time, I knew that there was support available if I needed it. If I had some more work to do in general then I would have felt that I had more opportunity to be responsible for my own work.

I learnt a lot of subject knowledge in my placement year as the placement role is directly related to my degree. Generally the types of analysis done in my department are more advanced than what I have learnt in university so far but I have a learnt the applied side of topics that I will learn in theory when I go back to university.

Focused on work. Very supportive. Intelligent.

It was very well organised during the placement. One suggestion for improvement would be to let us know before the placement what our role is in and what we do in general. I, along with a few other placement students, didn't actually know the details of the placement role before starting. For example, on my job contract the job title is simply 'Industrial Placement'

I got to spend a lot of time on personal development and learning and I was also given the opportunity to learn about other areas of the organisation which helped me to understand the 'bigger picture' of what I do.

I would love to work for GSK in the future however I would need to do a bit more research into the roles I can do with my degree as the current placement I am in would require me to do a fair bit of further education if I wanted to get this role in the future.

Yes, we were put into contact with the placement students working with us before we started our placement and this gave us a chance to get to know a few people before we started.

I feel that the cost of living was too high for the area especially considering there was not much to do in the area. The town was really small and there was barely a high street. The only social activity to do was to go to the pub since there were lots of pubs. The standard rent in the area that I was living in was £500 a month not including bills.

There was no nightlife in the town where I worked. There was a little bit of nightlife in the next town.

Yes. I took part in Go4Set mentoring during my placement which was a really good opportunity to see other sites and take part in an activity that was unrelated to the subject that my placement role was in